John Boehner: IRS should ‘come clean’ on lost emails

Speaker John Boehner challenged the Obama administration to “come clean” about a series of lost emails from the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS has lost more than two years’ worth of emails sent and received by former agency employee Lois Lerner — the figure at the head of the IRS’s tea party targeting controversy, as well as emails from at least six other employees.

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Congressional Republicans are seeking those documentss to investigate why the IRS cast extra scrutiny on conservative groups and if taxpayer information was illegally shared. But the IRS says Lerner’s hard drive crashed and the emails are lost.

“We still have a responsibility to provide oversight of the executive branch. The president said that there would be full cooperation with the IRS scandal and yet we found out late last week, and even more troubling yesterday, that all of these emails for several years have been lost,” Boehner said. “And the fact is they’ve known since February that these emails were lost.”

Congressional Republicans have repeatedly slammed the IRS for misleading Congress and have attempted to tie the White House to the ongoing scandal by connecting it to the agency’s missteps after the initial news broke in 2013.

“It’s time for the administration to come clean and be honest and truthful to the American people,” Boehner said.